The Making of the State

What needs to be asked is, How have things gone historically?What is the historical origin of the state?A realistic vision of the state must start from the assumption of the historicity of the state.The state has not always existed.It has its own place of origin and history: its birthplace is Continental Europe, and its origin roughly coincides with the beginnings of the modern age, between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.Three major events mark the entry into the modern age: the fall of Constantinople on May 29, 1453, which marked the end of the Eastern Roman Empire; the discovery of America in 1492; and the Protestant Reformation, which was sparked by Martin Luther on October 31, 1517.The modern age was a break with the Middle Ages and in particular with that structure of political power which had characterized European history for almost a millennium, a structure in which power was not centralized but dispersed among multiple centers of power.The state is modern.The Middle Ages and the ancient age didn't know state forms, because political organization of those periods was not even remotely comparable to that of the modern age.It is therefore necessary to be aware of the fact that, as Gianfranco Miglio (1918Miglio ( -2001) ) writes, "the type of political order in force today, far from being the only and inevitable product of universal reason, is only the result, basically quite occasional, of a series of historical conjunctures" (Miglio 1988, 803).